An experiment and reflections on how Not Knowing can enable Collective Knowing ….
My formative experiences of working with groups were rooted in not knowing. Without consciously knowing it (pun intended), my 22-year-old self used the power of not knowing to work with multi-discipline teams of engineers to put together complicated power plant installations. We were pioneering innovative technologies to generate heat and power in energy-efficient ways. My gender and youth were considered a disadvantage in this work, where men, all older than me, held the knowledge.
Of course, this story is all with hindsight 😊 Only now can I see how my ability to not know enabled me to bring diverse views into a room, and my willingness to ask the ‘dumb’ questions allowed for connection and innovation.
Over the years, as my experience and formal training in group work has deepened my practice, I have realised the power in a convener holding a frame of ‘not knowing’ as a way of enabling the group to know.
So, working with @Ee Ke Chew and @Mary Beth Robles to co-design and co-facilitate an experiment with not knowing, in the NTL International Conference, has connected with something I hold as deeply important, and the unfolding of the conversation last week was joyful.
I was struck by the social and emotional maturity of the group: the ability of people to listen generatively to views that differed from their own, and to develop new thinking together through this. This is what we aspire to when we talk about groups being ‘greater than the sum of their parts,’ and yet it is rare in the world today, particularly in business meetings. It requires us to hold our views lightly and be genuinely curious about different views. I have sometimes found these qualities in scientific research settings, where scientists hold a fascination for the subject and the progression of thinking above their own ego. There is something about a quest for learning that can hold a higher power than individual knowing — and, in fact, individual knowing can be just a defence which gets in the way of true learning.
One of the most significant aspects of the conversation for me was the reframing of rebels — not as a problem, but as people with innovative, new, creative ideas. It resonated for me, and as someone who sometimes feels like an outlier in the way I see the world, I found this reframe deeply affirming.
Overall, what stood out was the deep, human-with-human connection we formed. If we want to humanise our workplaces and communities, then it starts one meeting, one conversation at a time.